First Fujitsu VPP5000 Supercomputer Installed at Météo-France

In addition to weather forecast, the VPP5000 supercomputer will be used by researchers increasing their proficiency in the use of weather prediction models and developing more complex atmospheric and climate models. The new version of the global forecasting model, ARPEGE, is now being developed for VPP5000 enhancing the resolution by increasing the number of vertical levels and reducing the size of the mesh intervals on the surface of the earth, as well as adding the parameters like ozone, liquid water, etc.

Mr. Dominique Birman, Chief of Development at Computing Centre of Central Service of Operation of Meteorology said, "after the delivery, the VPP5000 was set up and powered on very quickly, and it seems that it is at the same very high level of reliability as the VPP700E. This supercomputer gives us 25 times the computing power of the Cray C98 we operated two years ago."

Successor to the VX/VPP300/VPP700 series, the VPP5000 is Fujitsu's newest generation high-performance vector parallel supercomputer series and provides the highest performance in the world. The parallel architecture of the VPP5000 series realizes scalable computing performance with configurations ranging from a single processor to a maximum of 512 processors.

Each processor utilizes the industry's most advanced low power consuming CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) technology LSIs and SDRAM memory units. The maximum performance of each processor is 9.6 Gflops, the fastest performance of any CMOS-based processor in the world.

Fujitsu has delivered a total of approximately 400 vector supercomputers throughout the world, of which 152 are in the VX/VPP300/VPP700 series. More than 30 VPP Series systems have already been installed throughout Europe. They are being widely used in France by scientific institutes and by industrial laboratories, such as CEA (Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique) and SNECMA (Societe Nationale d'Etudes et de Construction de Moteurs d'Avitation). Furthermore, several universities in Germany, along with the European Centre of Medium Weather Forecasting in the UK, are reaping the benefits of the VPP Series.